Donald Trump Is a Punch Line for Obama, Who Is Getting More Jokes Ready

WASHINGTON — Donald J. Trump’s transformation from reality TV star to presidential candidate threatening to tear apart the Republican Party is eliciting a mixture of disbelief, outrage and laughter among Democrats, and none more so than President Obama.

Mr. Trump has long been a punch line for Mr. Obama — the president skewered him in humorous speeches at three White House Correspondents’ Association dinners. But in recent months, Mr. Obama has made so many direct or indirect references to Mr. Trump that the real estate tycoon has become something of a stump-speech standard for the president. And instead of simply being a source of mirth, Mr. Trump has become Mr. Obama’s favored symbol for the country’s growing political dysfunction.

On Tuesday, Mr. Obama used the annual “Friends of Ireland” luncheon with lawmakers on Capitol Hill to launch his latest attack on Mr. Trump, although this time not by name. “We have heard vulgar and divisive rhetoric aimed at women and minorities — at Americans who don’t look like ‘us,’ or pray like ‘us,’ or vote like we do,” Mr. Obama said. A few days earlier at a fund-raiser in Austin, Tex., Mr. Obama was even more pointed. “We’ve got a debate inside the other party that is fantasy and schoolyard taunts and selling stuff like it’s the Home Shopping Network,” he said. He then went after Republican leaders like Mitt Romney who have in recent weeks expressed shock and outrage at Mr. Trump’s language.

“How can you be shocked?” Mr. Obama asked of Mr. Romney, the former presidential candidate who accepted Mr. Trump’s endorsement in 2012. “This is the guy, remember, who was sure that I was born in Kenya. Who just wouldn’t let it go.”

Aides recall the obviously false “birther” allegations stirred by Mr. Trump as an almost out-of-body experience. “Standing at the podium in the briefing room with the White House counsel to release the president’s birth certificate was probably the most surreal moment I had in the White House,” Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to Mr. Obama, wrote in an email.

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President Obama during the annual “Friends of Ireland” luncheon on Capitol Hill last week.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

Indeed, the day in April 2011 that Mr. Obama walked into the White House briefing room to directly address Mr. Trump’s allegations, Mr. Trump flew to New Hampshire in his signature plane to test the waters of a presidential run. Days later, Mr. Obama made Mr. Trump the object of a string of humiliating jokes at a White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, saying that Mr. Obama’s release of his birth certificate would allow Mr. Trump to “get back to focusing on the issues that matter like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?”

Mr. Trump soon left the dinner, evidently bruised. It was a moment that White House aides recall with relish.

“Trump is at his very nature an insecure carnival barker, so the best way to unmask him is to show everyone that it’s all a circus,” Mr. Pfeiffer wrote.

In a statement forwarded by his campaign staff on Sunday, Mr. Trump said that “if I had run in 2012, Obama would have been a one-term president.”

“Sadly for the United States, and in fact the world, I did not run,” Mr. Trump added. “According to every online poll, I have won every debate, and I would have done so with Obama, also. Obama would have been so easy for me — in fact, it was widely reported that when I was thinking about running, all he was talking about was Trump.”

During debates in the 2012 campaign, Mr. Obama again used Mr. Trump to make a point — this time to show how much Mr. Romney’s tax plans would favor the wealthy by classifying many as small businesses. “And I know Donald Trump doesn’t like to think of himself as small anything,” Mr. Obama said in what now seems a preview of a far more vulgar discussion about the size of Mr. Trump’s hands and appendages in this year’s debates, “but that’s how you define small businesses if you’re getting business income.”

After Mr. Trump vowed last fall to deport any Syrian refugee the Obama administration managed to settle in the United States, Mr. Obama lost his sense of humor. Standing beside President Benigno Aquino III of the Philippines in Manila, he lashed out at politicians using refugees as a political tool, including those “who suggest that they’re so tough that just talking to Putin or staring down ISIL, or using some additional rhetoric somehow is going to solve the problems out there.”

“But apparently, they’re scared of widows and orphans coming into the United States of America as part of our tradition of compassion,” Mr. Obama continued, and then mentioned complaints by Republican candidates that moderators of CNBC’s recent debate were too tough. “First, they were worried about the press being too tough on them during debates. Now they’re worried about 3-year-old orphans. That doesn’t sound very tough to me.”

White House aides have little doubt about which man would win an electoral matchup. “One thing I have lamented with former colleagues is that the president doesn’t get to run against Donald Trump,” said Bill Burton, a former spokesman for the Obama campaign.

Republican challengers to Mr. Trump have yet to settle on an effective strategy to counter him. Marco Rubio now is widely seen as all but ending his presidential hopes when he began mocking Mr. Trump with crude jokes. And Mr. Trump has managed to shrug off attacks about his shifting positions and questionable business practices. “To date, Obama is the only public figure who is able to put Trump in his place without rolling around in the mud with him,” Mr. Pfeiffer said.

Whether that record continues will soon become clear if Mr. Trump wins the Republican presidential nomination. Mr. Obama has vowed to campaign vigorously for the eventual Democratic nominee, whom Mr. Obama has told Democratic donors will soon be Hillary Clinton. But whether his line of attack against Mr. Trump would be outrage, humor or a mixture of both is uncertain.

“I mean, imagine what Trump would say if he actually had a record like this,” Mr. Obama said to laughter at the recent fund-raiser in Austin. “Instead of selling steaks. Has anybody tried that wine? How good can that wine be? I’m sorry. Where was I?”

Correction:

An earlier version of this article gave an incorrect name for a former adviser to President Obama. He is Dan Pfeiffer, not David.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump Is a Punch Line for Obama, Who Is Getting More Jokes Ready. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe